Shorter Times Op-Ed: Adam Lanza Resembles Palestinians

Curious op-ed piece in the Times today by Adam Lankford, an assistant professor from Alabama who claims that his examination of ”interviews, case studies and suicide notes” indicates that “rampage shooters” like Adam Lanza are “remarkably similar to aberrant mass killers–including suicide terrorists–in other countries.” He concludes that Lanza and the Virginia Tech and Columbine shooters–had they been born in Gaza and the West Bank and “shaped by terrorist organizations’ hateful propaganda”–would have become suicide bombers.

Really who knows. Lankford’s speculations contradict the far more systematic and detailed suicide terrorism study conducted by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, which examined the case histories of 2200 instances of suicide terrorism and concluded that the overwhelming majority are in response to foreign military occupation. Pape and his co-author James Feldman demonstrated that suicide bombings were not particularly a Muslim phenomenon. Mental illness did not come up as an important causal factor.

One rampage shooting Adam Lankford failed to mention in his Times piece was that of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the American born physician who perpetrated the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in 1994, killing 29 Muslim worshippers and wouding 125. Goldstein’s massacre shattered the optimism surrounding the Oslo peace process and preceded by several years the wave of anti-Israeli suicide bombings orchestrated by Hamas. Israeli settlers in Jerusalem still sing songs eulogizing Dr. Goldstein.

One might have thought that since Goldstein was protected by the Israeli occupation forces and not subject to a foreign military occupation, he might be a good candidate for a theory linking mental illness and rampage shootings. But of course the Goldstein case wouldn’t fit easily into a narrative linking Adam Lanza to the “hateful propaganda” in Gaza and the West Bank.

Yes, that was a passing strange op/ed piece. The final paragraph is a fearless leap into the Twilight Zone. The rest of it reads like a blurb from one of those phony “anti-terrorism experts” who suddenly sprang up like mushrooms to exploit the post 9/11 hysteria.

You cite Pape and Feldman’s conclusions, but they don’t seem to contradict the thesis in the Op-Ed. Correct me if I’m wrong (I haven’t read Pape’s book), but the researchers might have been looking at two completely different things: Pape and Feldman, at what causes martyrdom attacks; and Lankford, at why some people and not others decide to commit mass murder and suicide in their given society at any given time. Obviously, Lankford’s question cannot be answered by political factors alone. It would be quite consistent to explain it largely by mental illness and truly suicidal wishes, along with the other personal factors given by Lankford, and at the same time to conclude that mental illness is not an important cause of martyrdom attacks in general.

The Goldstein shooting should not be emphasized here; not because it was on behalf of “the wrong side,” but because it’s just a single event. In the case of Muslim martyrdom attacks and American mass shootings, there are unfortunately enough cases to look for a pattern.

On the people who eulogize Goldstein’s shooting attack: It’s important to understand how they themselves see it. At least in the 1990s, they had a bizarre conspiracy theory where Goldstein somehow learned that the people in the mosque were preparing a terrorist attack, and (I don’t remember the details) somehow his shooting up the people in the mosque resulted from his trying to prevent the attack. Supposedly, the media conspired to keep all this a secret.

It’s a truly insane belief, but in a way it’s to the credit of his fans. They couldn’t support what it really was, a mass murder of innocent people; they had to rationalize it as a pre-emptive strike against an aggressor. That belief doesn’t absolve these crazies of moral blame, but it’s still to their credit in a weird way.

This is truly a ridiculous comparison by Lankford. One can certainly condemn Palestinian and other terrorists but the Palestinians are not shooting up Palestinian schools and Palestinian children. What they are doing is, in their view, and act of war against their declared enemies (the Israelis, whether soldiers or civilians) no matter how twisted or wrong we see it. As that scene in the classic “Battle of Algiers” when one character is upbraided for using bombs to kill civilians and he notes that “we would rather use tanks and jets like you but we don’t have them.” Interesting that no one much notes that the Bushmaster Assault Rifle used during the Newtown massacre is a civilian version of the M-16 – certainly Baruch Goldstein is a much more accurate comparison or something William Calley’s men might have done at Mi Lai.

This is truly a ridiculous comparison by Lankford. One can certainly condemn Palestinian and other terrorists but the Palestinians are not shooting up Palestinian schools and Palestinian children. What they are doing is, in their view, and act of war against their declared enemies (the Israelis, whether soldiers or civilians) no matter how twisted or wrong we see it.

This is beyond the point. Pape’s narrative is not about terrorism per se–it is about obscuring the link between terrorism and Islam. It is not enough to say that his point is horrendously flawed, especially when one compares Pape’s “experiences” with those who, unlike Pape and cohort, DO know and have first hand experience both with Islam and Terrorism, e.g. Anwar Sheikh. I am not going to even go into elaborations here on why Wahabism (Salafism) was officially banned in Dagestan nor there is a necessity here to elaborate on a dynamics of the so called “radicalization” of Ummah, let alone view the actual jihad statistics–all that makes Pape’s narrative no more than agenda-driven faux-science. The issue here is this: neocons and, in general, AIPAC crowd did monopolize the discussion on Islam and its relation to Western Civilization. In doing so, they discredited, or obscured the very premise of the discussion on Islam which is absolutely crucial for Western civilization. The issue became so politicized, so Israel(ised) and so Politically Correct(ed) that it was, indeed, reduced to merely Israel-Palestinian (Arab, Islam) dichotomy, when, in reality, the issue is very complex and multifaceted.

Jihad, as well as hatred of infidels, of course Jews are a very special case, is the organic part of Islam. The whole Pape’s point about (Islamic) terrorism being a response to foreign military occupation debunks itself, no matter how inaccurate parallels by Lankford may be, when one begins to look at the Middle Asia, as well as when one labors to acquaint oneself with the agenda and discussions in ODKB (CSTO) throughout 2012 and what this organization prepares itself for. In general, the use of Pape’s narrative as an argument in any discussion about the history and the nature of Islam and its relation to violence is at best dubious, at worst–ignorant.

I thought the op/ed in the Times was very bogus and the work of someone who has gained fame/fees for telling Americans, especially American Jews of a conservative persuasion, what they want to hear:

That crazy mixed up American kid killers are equivalent to so called Palestinian terrorists.

There is nothing imaginary about Israeli and American injustice to this group and the way they act mirrors Irish and African action against the British, as well as Polish reaction to the Nazis, much more closely than odd American children, steeped in a violent culture, lashing out at the most innocent of victims.

McConnell and the other commenters here are much more valid in their insights — which I’m surprised to find on a Conservative website.

I thought the piece by Adam Lankford was curious as well, but saw its purpose as simply to a take an American tragedy and use it to create hatred for the Palestinians.
The massacre by Baruch Goldstein is never listed in American media in surveys of world wide mass killings. I am not surprised. (By the way, wasn’t Goldstein an American citizen?)